QuickAdvice: Simply Discover New Music With SimplePlayer
SimplePlayer (Free) by Daft Logic Studio is a free music player for your iPhone and iPod Touch that allows you to search for and listen to music tracks and share them with friends.
SimplePlayer lets you search for any artist or song by simply typing a part or the entire name of the artist/song. You'll then get a list of 10 various songs, with an option to load more if there are more results to show.
The song name will be displayed in large type, with the band or artist appearing below in smaller type. On the left will be a Play button, which will start playing the song in it's entirety. On the right is a button with a + symbol, which you would think would add it to a kind of playlist.
Wrong.
This is button is to share the selected song to your friends. Options of sharing it are by email, Twitter, or Facebook. For all of these, it will contain a link to the song uploaded on the web via a smplr.in URL, which belongs to SimplePlayer.
If your'e unsure of what to search for, there are Top 100 lists of popular radio stations, though I noticed that most of them seem to be Russian. I guess that would help in your new music discovery though!
When any song is playing, a small little bar will be displayed at the top of the app with Previous, Play/Pause, and Forward controls, along with an audio scrubber. Next to the search field is a small button with two arrows pointing up and down - this button will hide or show the playback controls. This is a nice touch for those moments when you don't want the controls taking up screen space.
Remember that this app works via EDGE/3G or WiFi network, so make sure to monitor the streaming if working over a cellular data network connection.
In the app's More section, there is a volume slider, which I found to be a bit useless since you can easily adjust the volume using the physical buttons. There is also a Help section, even though the app is fairly straight-forward. A license agreement is found here in case you like to read legalese, and there is the Credits of the app and a link to More Apps from the developers.
The app supports multitasking in iOS 4.0+, even though it says that it still supports 3.0. So you can exit out of the app on 4.0+ devices and the music will continue to play in the background.
In case you were wondering how this app is able to have all of this music available for free to the end user, it's because SimplePlayer pulls data from music-oriented services like: prostopleer.com, vk.com, and vpleer.ru.
The audio quality is decent, but it's not the best I've heard. But for the price of free, it's nothing to complain about and is an easy way to find new music. It would also be cool if you could create a kind of playlist to save songs for future reference, but with other music apps out there, it's not necessary.
For the free price tag, there's nothing to lose.
